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When firefighter Matt Johnston was growing up in Whalley, he had dreams of becoming a star basketball player.

But reality, like a cold dash of water on the steamy court, hit him one day. Standing only 5-foot-8, he knew in his heart he might as well have been reaching for the moon. Falling through the cracks academically in Grade 8, even post-secondary school seemed unrealistic.

Then, in Grade 9, he discovered running. And as his feet picked up, so did his grades. He won a couple of high school provincial championships and then a running scholarship to SFU. He’d go on to complete a masters in counselling psychology at UBC.

He’s now come full circle, back in the community where he grew up, working as a firefighter in the Whalley area and helping kids from Kwantlen Park secondary find their feet by enrolling them in the Sun Run.

The Wolf Pack, as the team is called, is getting ready to roar in its inaugural event.

Johnston knows none of this would have been possible without a bond formed many years ago with another runner, Jeff Schiebler, who works as a firefighter just across the bridge in New Westminster.

Schiebler is a two-time Olympian who spent nine years as a professional runner in Japan.

Like two streams merging to form a powerful river, each has brought his own gifts to the running club they’ve shared since 2005. They are bound in a common cause by a love of running and a belief in its power to transform lives.

The story of their partnership began long ago.

Johnston looked up to Schiebler, who was four years older and one of the few distance runners actually making a living at the sport.

“There was an aura of mystery around him because he lived in Japan,” Johnston recalled on a windy afternoon when The Vancouver Sun met up with the two firefighters and members of the Wolf Pack in Surrey.

Johnston’s curiosity was further piqued during his second year of university when Schiebler began breaking Canadian records. But his idol lived worlds away across an ocean. Johnston was able to meet him while competing in Japan with the national team, but while the two would remain in touch, they went their separate ways.

Johnston would return home, where he’d get a job as a youth worker with the Vancouver park board. While there, he started a running club in the Downtown East Side. That was 2003, and he found himself spread thin, trying to organize entry fees, transportation and dealing with all the other details of running such a club while fulfilling his duties as a youth worker.

Enter Schiebler.

In 2005, he had retired as a competitive runner and moved back to his home community of New Westminster to become a firefighter. They met for a second time on the Skytrain, while each were heading east to their home, Johnston in Surrey and Schiebler in New West.

When Johnston told him about the club, Schiebler offered to help run it.

At first, Johnston was skeptical. “If I had a nickel or dime for everyone who said they wanted to help out with these things, I’d be a wealthy man.”

True to his word, Schiebler showed up. Instead of sticking around for a month or two, he became a faithful volunteer. Their professional running days behind them, Johnston and Schiebler, now aged 34 and 39, began redirecting their passion for the sport.

In 2008, the club was transplanted to Whalley, back to Johnston’s roots are and close to where they both live and work. Their first task in Whalley was to try to get elementary school kids to take up the sport.

Today, those very same kids are now finishing high school and are a testament to the groundwork laid by the pair.

Team on the groundComing over the hill, they appear as a cloud ready to burst upon the horizon.

As they come closer, individual faces come into focus. Some are black, some are white; some are tall, some are not. Some look like they have just skipped out from a church choir practice; others have many pierced body parts.

Together, they make up the Sun Run Wolf Pack.

Fifteen-year-old Stephanie Gonzalez-Arevalo might easily fall into the first category, except for a vaguely rebellious streak of blue hair framing her face.

Other than that, she comes across as clean and pure as the white on the snow-capped mountains that frame the running field.

“Most teenagers would be into video games or some others would be lost in drugs or alcohol,” she explains.

But she is into the Sun Run.

“I thought, why not try something new? I like challenging myself.”

Gonzalez-Arevalo and Anna Ribakovm, 16, took up running thanks to Johnston’s influence when they were in elementary school. Like a ripple spreading outward, they got others to sign up. Ribakov drew in 14-year-old Shaun Renshaw. Now, the two playfully jockey for the position of president of the Kwantlen Park running club. For the moment, Renshaw holds the honour.

With her willowy athleticism, 16-year-old Charlotte Anderson looks like she could have just leaped off a balance beam. In fact, she used to do gymnastics but found running much more to her liking.

The four runners joke a lot, but seem to be connected by a thread running below the surface.

“If someone is tired, we keep going. We support each other,” said Renshaw.

Whalley has long had a reputation as a place of poverty, drug use and broken dreams, but there are hopeful signs of a turnaround with a new city hall going into the area and major efforts to rejuvenate the community. If these kids represent the future, then surely it can’t be so bad.

“It’s not as bad as the rap people give it,” said Anderson. She likes the area because it is more quiet than Vancouver and a bit more rural.

Like many teenagers, they struggle with relationships, school pressures and the stresses of traversing the uncertain bridge between being a child and an adult.

“For me, I’ve had times when it’s just like I wanted to run away,” said Gonzalez-Arevalo. “When I start running, it’s like I’m in my own world. I feel very calm. It’s like no one can do any harm to me.”

In addition to this core group of kids who run for fun and fitness, Johnston and Schiebler have helped elite runners like 18-year-old Tim Delcourt who, after graduating from Kwantlen Park, will go to the University of Idaho on a track-and-field scholarship.

Delcourt says with a smile that he considers himself a “track nerd.” His running vocabulary and encyclopedic knowledge of the sport only serve to buttress his self-description.

He credits the firefighting duo for this. “They really inspired me not just to become an athlete of the sport but to become a student of the sport.”

When his training became too rigorous for the pair, they turned him over to another firefighter, Scott Kent, for coaching.

In short, Delcourt credits the firefighters for giving him a love of the sport. And “once you fall in love with running, there is no going back.”

subheadAs of last week, 86 high school students and 26 elementary school students had signed up for the Sun Run through Johnston and Schiebler.

The efforts, says Johnston, are more than worth it and could make a huge difference to some of the kids.

Johnston — who also works part-time as a counsellor in the area with funding from the CKNW Orphans Fund — has learned to recognize the face of at-risk youth and recognizes some of them in the Wolf Pack.

Schiebler — an Olympian in 1996 and 2000 — knows the heart-stopping pain and joy of competitive running, but that is not what this is about.

“We’ll run with anybody. The beauty of what we are trying to do is not about creating Olympians. It’s about participation. It’s about providing opportunities, building self-esteem, achieving goals, whatever they might be.”

When Johnston began seeking recruits to their drop-in practice runs, he deliberately set out to attract not just the keen runners but also those who might be helped by running, those who might be struggling at home or in school.

“You could make the argument that every kid in this neighborhood is at risk,” he said. “But I would say 50 per cent of these kids will have a very difficult time finishing regular stream high school. There is a large number of kids who are not in a place to share their story and they are very difficult stories.”

Within the running group, “we have youth who have experienced tremendous abuse. We also have youth who have delved into self-harm.”

He believes running can be an elixir for them. It gets the heart pumping and the endorphins running. It gets you closer to nature. In short, it makes you feel better. It also connects you with adult mentors like Johnston and Schiebler. Sometimes, it’s easier to open up on neutral territory like a running field than in a clinical setting.

Then there is the Sun Run itself. What could be more glorious than getting up on a Sunday morning, venturing into the city on the Skytrain and running with a sea of smiling people with the North Shore mountains and the sparkling waters of English Bay as a perfect backdrop?

People who regularly walk the seawall might take this for granted, but for many in the Wolf Pack, this will be a grand adventure, says Johnston. Many “are used to putting their head down and walking past people who they view as fearful.”

The timing of the Sun Run is also right. Spring is a time of new beginnings, of renewed hope.

Building a teamIt has taken a lot of work to put the Wolf Pack Sun Run group together. Working as an outsider in a big high school can be intimidating, but Johnston knows in his heart what he is doing is right.

No less daunting are the kids themselves, the reluctant recruits. “Meet you on the running course at 2:40!” he’d tell them, giving them the high-five. Often they wouldn’t show up, then as unpredictably as the weather, they would.

Johnston, who has a four-year-old at home, and Schiebler, who has a four-year-old, a two-year-old and a newborn, have had to work the running club around their duties as dads and their jobs as firefighters.

But firefighters are a fraternity that likes to help out in the community. The pair are bolstered by the support they’ve received from the Surrey fire charitable fund, which is sponsoring the group.

Johnston thinks back to the kid he once was, the kid whose ambitions were dwarfed on the basketball court. Running opened vistas for him. On a practical level, it paid for 10 years of university.

He likens the running club to connecting kids to some of the little seams in life. You don’t know where they will lead, but on a gut level, you know to follow them. Sometimes, they lead you to bigger and better places.

Running took him there. Maybe, just maybe, it will take some of these kids there, too.

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